Response 10

At first, the answer to this week's blog question strikes me as painfully obvious: no, a country can never be secure. But, although I could probably spend a few paragraphs phrasing this in creative ways and bringing in various anecdotes to support this statement, the answer is obviously a simple yes.

Then I look at the question again, more specifically, at the first part of the question. And, when I look at the question, a second time, I'm inclined to change my answer to an equally resounding "no". I remain firmly convinced that security is not a binary state, and not something that can ever entirely be achieved. But I am convinced, just as firmly, that this has nothing to do with the ambiguity of "security." We can define security in any arbitrary way we which, so we can have an infinite number of goals that are unrealizable with a finite number of resources -- so in this sense "security" is unrealizable because of ambiguity.

But, although a definition can fundamentally never be "wrong" per se, a definition can be useful or useless. The semantically-grounded argument that "security" can be defined in infinite ways ignores that, in the popular discourse, "security" does have at least a relatively fixed meaning. I can say that "popsicle" is the integer between three and five, and this definition isn't wrong, but it fails to capture the meaning (defined by prototypes, not algorithms) of what other people conceive as "popsicle" -- my definition of "popsicle" can not actually serve as a vehicle for communication, and is not a constitutive part of the popular discourse

The way in which I would attempt to algorithmically summarize how the concept of "national security" (as opposed to "individual security") exists within the popular discourse is that national security is the stability of the institutionalized power relations among the constituent people of a state. The precise ends that can be used to achieve this definition of national security are ambiguous, and this definition of national security is only minimally useful in policy formation. But the concept is both fairly valid and fairly precise. We can perhaps achieve a few different algorithmic definitions, in addition to this one, each of which do a sufficient job of summarizing the prototypical definitions of national security that exist in discourse -- but the number of such effective definitions are finite and quite limited. Irrelevant definitions should be ignored; for all effective purposes, they do not exist.

According to the definition of security I presented here, and before that in class, security is unachievable because it is algorithmically based on the stability of social relationships -- and social relationships are defined by the constantly shifting sum of social interactions. Any interaction between actors redefines, in some way, the scope of the interaction between these actors.

However, interactions may stay within a relatively constant, stable scope, or a relatively volatile one. "Security" and "insecurity" are not absolute binary states, and can never be achieved; rather, they are directions on an axis. They are comparable to "positive" and "negative" on a number line, positions which may never be reached but may be traveled towards.